Show Business: Trying to Be Nice

"I was always what you call a nice child," says Poet Ntozake Shange. "I
did everything nice. I was the nicest and the most correct. I did my
homework. I was always on time. I never got into fights. People now ask
me, 'Where did all this rage come from?' And I just smile and say it's
been there all the time, but I was just trying to be nice."

When she was 19, newly separated from her law-student husband, she tried
to kill herself. She put her head in a gas oven, but her aunt pulled
her out. Since then she...